Congratulations on starting up flight testing! We Armadillos have been eager to see you get to this point -- we want to see other guys hovering too!

Thanks Matt! You guys have been always been a great support for us. Here's to hoping we can get everything ready and debugged in time to give you Armadillos some real competition this October. Happy flyin!

Nice to seen some decent armadillo competition!! I really enjoy the way you (and armadillo) keep us informed on your development.

Since powering up the engines and keeping the vehicle stable seems a problem for now, why don't you try to power up all engines without liftoff on a stable launch platform? just a little throttle without flying and after that maybe a little hop or something like that?

Well, looking forward for nice stable flight (and some more nice swings on the tether)

When you say "The outcome was that it wasnâ€™t perfect but it was workable and should be competitive for the NG-LLC"

Are you thinking about 2008? If so will we see some eye-candy posts?

Well, we are "thinking" about competing in 2008, but if we do so or not depends a lot on how things go over the next several months. But either way, we'll be posting eye-candy from time-to-time as we have something to post.

Seriously though, after looking over the damage, we realized that while we could probably have XA-0.1 patched back up and back under the tether within a week, that it probably wasn't worth it. We've learned a lot from the vehicle and the design process, but there's a certain point where continuing down a given path isn't the best investment of time or resources.

We're in the process of formalizing our plans for moving forward, and should have more details up on the blog in the next few days/weeks.

Jon, thanks for the link!Great picture! well from our stand point! Any videos or other media available?Good luck to you guys!

As the post says, we should have some better video soon. Our video camera didn't have a very good angle, but we there was a film crew on site that had a much better shot. We're waiting to get a digitized copy from them. Hopefully we'll have something to put up in the next few days.

Quote:

You say you could get it under the tether in a week. Are you tempted to really push it hard with the mentality that if it blows up then you haven't lost anything now?

Not really. We have a finite amount of money and man-hours we can throw at things, and spending more money on trying to get XA-0.1 back together looks like a very poor utilization of our resources. We've got some plans that we'll go more into soon, but at least for right now, we're probably just going to scavenge all the still useful stuff off of the vehicle (which is really most of the hardware), and let it rest in peace.

We'll be updating the blog on a more regular basis in the future. I like the smaller, single topic posts better than the monthly all-in-one style, so I plan to post more often. Jon will be posting as well.